Sunday, June 17, 2007

Archbishop Tutu: God is weeping

Dierdre Good, of Not Being a Sausage, posted a heads-up to the following quote from Desmond Tutu. I looked up a slightly fuller version than she posts - I can't add anything to that wonderful man's words, so without further preamble, here is what he said:

"Vanity Fair’s Africa 7/2007 issue features an interview of South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu by Brad Pitt. The engaging article can be found in the July 2007 issue of Vanity Fair on page 96.

An excerpt on gay rights:

Brad Pitt: So certainly discrimination has no place in Christianity. There’s a big argument going on in America right now, on gay rights and equality.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu: For me, I couldn’t ever keep quiet, I come from a situation where for a very long time people were discriminated against, made to suffer for something about which they could do nothing–their ethnicity. We were made to suffer because we were not white. Then, for a very long time in our church, we didn’t ordain women, and we were penalizing a huge section of humanity for something about which they could do nothing–their gender. And I’m glad that now the church has changed all that. I’m glad that apartheid has ended. I could not for any part of me be able to keep quiet, because people were being penalized, ostracized, treated as if they were less than human, because of something they could do nothing to change–their sexual orientation. For me, I can’t imagine the Lord that I worship, this Jesus Christ, actually concurring with the persecution of a minority that is already being persecuted. The Jesus who I worship is a Jesus who was forever on the side of those who were being clobbered, and he got into trouble precisely because of that. Our church, the Anglican Church, is experiencing a very, very serious crisis. It is all to do with human sexuality. I think God is weeping. He is weeping that we should be spending so much energy, time resources on this subject at a time when the world is aching."